Mark Warburton must make himself sick with his constant wailing.
I know he drives the rest of us up the wall with it.
Every positive effort people have made in the last couple of years, in a quest to make the game a wee bit better, this guy has found a reason to complain about. He wants the youth league scrapped. He wants plastic pitches done away with. It goes on and on with this guy.
Today he’s moaning about the winter break. He doesn’t think it’s timed properly. He seems not to realise that even if you had the winter break in August it would necessitate extending the season. He seems to think it’s in the power of the SFA to create new days on the calendar.
If he’s talking about summer football that’s a different argument but as he also seems to be looking towards a time when he has more than a handful of international players he knows full well that in international tournament years that’s going to give him something else to moan about.
Not one of the hack pack pointed out this self-evident fact.
This is all about money, of course. It has sod all to do with the best interests of the game. His club is skint – as I said last night – and he knows that if they aren’t to go down like the Titanic they’re going to need money. He, like others at Ibrox, is convinced that Europe is the answer to their prayers. It’s wishful thinking; with the squad he’s got they won’t make it out of the first round. But they are staking everything on it, on group stages and maybe further.
It’s ridiculous, and the disrespect it shows to other clubs is abominable.
Aberdeen won last night, to go second. Hearts should be able to take care of business today.
That puts pressure on the Ibrox club but that’s nothing compared to the pressure it puts on itself with this kind of rhetoric. These guys are counting money that’s not even there, complaining about how they can enjoy the fruits of a success they’ve not secured.
They just assume it. They assume that the rest of the season will now pass in a happy daze. They are the only club in the country that, before the Scottish Cup has even kicked off, would talk about how inconvenienced they will be if they win the thing.
Who do they think they are?
They think they are Rangers, of course, but they’re not.
Warburton has bought into it all the way now. He’s staking his future in the game on the notion that this club still scares other clubs rigid with only the name. Perhaps he thinks European teams who’ve barely heard the name will be equally afraid of them, because if the disrespect towards other Scottish clubs is astounding its nothing compared to their presumption that the Group stages of the major competitions are just there for the taking.
They’ve won a few games on the bounce – if you forget we beat them in between times – and the complacency has already set in. It’s in every word their manager and players say; forget the rest of the league (because they have). It’s all about how they can “still catch Celtic.”
Everyone else is in afterthought.
Warburton better hope so, because it’s his neck in the noose if they’re wrong.
And they are.